Re-Thinking Thinking: The Birth of AI

What happens when a university brings together engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and artists to tackle the world’s toughest problems? You get the hashtag. Wi-Fi. “Toy Story.” Artificial intelligence. And even Silly Putty.

For the Season Three finale of Where What If Becomes What’s Next, we are replaying an episode from Season One, on perhaps CMU's most important innovation: artificial intelligence.

This is also the season where we celebrated Carnegie Mellon’s 125th anniversary, spotlighting 15 CMU inventions that changed the world. Among them, the hashtag. The Nest thermostat. Modsy’s reinvention of home design. Alice’s success teaching millions of students to code through storytelling. Food Rescue Hero. Wi-Fi. Kevlar protective clothing. The revolutionary computer animation that made “Toy Story” possible. And an accidental discovery called Silly Putty.

As for artificial intelligence, it all started in 1956, when CMU professors Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell presented what is widely considered the first AI program. In this episode, we tell their story and hear from other early AI pioneers at CMU, who share personal recollections, and milestones in AI and robotics.  As you’ll hear, the rest is AI history. 

Featured guests on this episode are: Tom Mitchell, CMU Founders University Professor; Dr. Raj Reddy, Moza Bint Nasser University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics in the School of Computer Science at CMU; and Dr. Manuela Veloso, the head of JP Morgan AI Research and the Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at CMU. 

Thank you for listening to Where What If Becomes What’s Next.  Check out past episodes and stay up to date on what’s next at cmu.edu/whatsnextpodcast.